


Ch-ch-ch-changes

by Yeomanrand



Category: Fringe
Genre: Awesome_POC, Gen, Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-09
Updated: 2010-08-09
Packaged: 2017-10-11 00:35:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/106289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yeomanrand/pseuds/Yeomanrand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the prompt "theories of evolution"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ch-ch-ch-changes

**Author's Note:**

> Available as a [podfic](http://cantapodpatrol.dreamwidth.org/12492.html#cutid3) thanks to [cantarina](http://cantarina.dreamwidth.org/) at Dreamwidth.

Astrid half-listens to Walter mutter to himself. She presses her face against Jean's warm side, hands occupied with squeezing and pulling.

Walter roams around the laboratory, and Astrid knows he's only half-aware he's talking. That happens, sometimes, and where some of _those_ times he lets little true pieces of himself slip in his ramblings if he does this time she'll be able to recall them later. She doesn't need to give him her full attention now.

This is one of the ways she has changed, adapted in relation to the environmental stress Walter provides. She used to think she had to listen closely to everything he said, for those _bon mots_ that might drop out of his madness, for a pearl instead of a toad falling from his lips. Now, she knows better, and instead listens to the hiss of the milk hitting the side of the metal bucket.

She used to get annoyed when he called her something not quite her name, because he had no trouble remembering anyone else's. She wondered sometimes if his problem was that she was a woman (but he had no trouble with Olivia), or because she was black (but he had no trouble with Broyles), or some combination of the two (she considered this most likely). Whatever his reasoning, or lack of it -- he was Walter, after all -- she'd thought he didn't respect her.

But when they'd worked together to eliminate the virus, he'd trusted her without hesitation, called her "Agent Farnsworth" throughout, listened and spoke to her as his equal. And then he'd told the story of Peter's stolen heart to Ella, and she realized he'd known her name perfectly well all along.

She wants to ask. She knows knowing changes something, means another evolutionary shift in their relationship, but she's not sure what mutation is necessary.

So, she milks Jean, and half-listens to Walter half-consciously muttering, and forms theories of her own.


End file.
